A Deep River Year
May 7,  2014

These are sweet days, gentle, delicate.   These May days are tender, as if their life is not quite fully formed.  They are the times of birth and bud.   Now the first life in the garden is apparent.  The peas are an inch or two high, and the onion sets have pushed up through the friable earth with their tiny green swords.  Soon it will be time for the first mowing of the grass, which is already dotted with golden blossoms of beautiful dandelions.  Loveliest of all, I discovered this week that the Quaker Ladies are in bloom--waves and waves of them--in the vacant lots and across the cemetery’s meadows, and even in the thin strips of earth between sidewalks and streets.  Also known as bluets, these fragile little blossoms—blue with a golden center—are an ephemeral sign of Spring’s promise.

Saturday, our granddaughters spent the day with us.   The sun was shining, and a light breeze blew through the greening maple branches.    It was a day for badminton and whiffle ball, for a hot dog picnic and a long ride on the swing.   And for bubbles.   It’s never enough just to use the little soap bubble wand you can buy at the variety store.  You need to pour quarts of the stuff into a upturned garbage can lid and use one of those big hoops that make enormous bubbles, bubbles with curious shapes and remarkable size, bubbles that rise and sail on the spring wind reflecting rainbows in their passage below the sun.

No matter how old you are, you want to have a turn at making bubbles like that.   They make you laugh and cheer, marveling at their magic.   There are laws of physics that explain a bubble, things that have to do with inner air pressure and surface tension.   It is enough for me that they are wondrous and beautiful, and that anyone can make them.   C.S. Lewis once wrote that love has three dimensions—one arising out of our needs, another from what we can give to others.  The third is appreciative love,  when we merely stand in awe, feeling joy or elation.   Our heart wants to sing: “We give thee thanks for this great glory!”  Sometimes we have this kind of love for what is holy.   Sometimes we have it for bubbles, or Quaker Ladies winking at us in the grass.

Bubble

Up into the blue it sails,
Shimmering with rainbow light,
Held for a moment
On the wind--
An evanescent glory.
It is lifted by a breath,
And filled by a breath,
The very breath of one little life
That may be as ephemeral
As this bright thing.
We stand in a world
Of passing wonders,
The choir of bluets on the cemetery hill,
The bee at rest on a quince blossom,
The wild mint rising in turned earth,
A child awake to joy,
And this sigh of delight in me,
this whisper of laughter
that slips out, rises like a bubble
full of breath,
and then is gone.

--Timothy Haut, May 7,  2014